Monday, April 18, 2016

No. 66 Alan Moore

First Prog: 170

Final Prog: 466

Total appearances: 132

-not including a couple of his
one-offs that were reprinted within the Prog (itself an incredibly rare
occurrence, I think the only other time that’s been done was on Dredd?). Also not including Monster, which I may as well plug again following the Jesus Redondo post!

In general, Quinch is rather sweet.Art by Alan Davis

Creator Credits:

Abelaard Snazz

Skizz

D.R. and Quinch

Halo Jones

Other writing credits:

Ro Busters

ABC Warriors

Rogue Trooper

All the best Future Shocks and
Time Twisters*

Notable character creations:

Abelaard Snazz

Skizz, Roxy, Loz, Cornelius,
the fiendishly Suth Efrican Van Owen

D.R., Quinch and just about
every character, however minor, from that delightful slice of lunacy**

I’m tempted to lead
with ‘beard, being a wizard’, but I’m not sure either had much bearing on his
time with 2000AD. Simply put, he is clever, funny, and a crafter of neat plots
that always make sense. Did I mention clever and funny? Those two stick out
above all, for me. Great at creating rounded characters within a fiendishly
short space of time. When not being overtly funny, he has a tendency to reach
for emotion/melodrama, looking for the inherent pathos of the story set-up.

On Alan:

Does the internet
really need one more person’s writings on Alan Moore? Even allowing that I’m
only going to talk about his work
for 2000AD, there has already been plenty of virtual ink spilled, and I doubt
I’ve got anything new to say. As a comics personality, Moore has gone from being revered to being
maligned to being revered again. But I think the consensus remains that he’s
the best ever writer of US/UK comics, and frankly I’m not going to argue with
that consensus. Although I would happily argue (along with many of you reading
this!) that he’s by no means the best writer of 2000AD specifically…

So let’s get into it,
shall we? It begins, as ever, with Future
Shocks. And what glorious Shocks they were! It’s not as if he had a story
in every Prog, but as often as not, an Earthlet picking up 2000AD between progs
170 and 332 would get a small but perfect hit of Alan Moore cleverness and
comedy. He didn’t reinvent the wheel or break the mould or any of those clichés
– he just did the job extremely well. Concepts, characters, executions, tidy
plotting, punchlines.

Two characters created and made memorable without even being drawn! Love it.Art by Jesus Redondo

And that's not even the ending.Art by Eric Bradbury

A classic Moore trick here: shove in an incongruous and very British name to extarct extra laffs.Art by Dave Gibbons

By all accounts, his
panel descriptions were so detailed that it didn’t leave much room for the
artists – and a lot of different artists tackled Moore’s scripts – to do
anything wrong. But it clearly left a lot for them room to do right.

There’s a thing people
sometimes say about authors that they write compelling stories, but their
actual ‘writing’ isn’t very good. A typical example of this would be
multi-selling religio-thriller novelist Dan Brown. I’ve never read his books,
but I a) believe the claim and b) find it entirely spurious at the same time.
How bad can someone’s writing be if millions of people are still going to read
all the way through a book?

Moore's thoughts on rock stars in three easy stereotypes.Art by Alan Davis

Anyway, Alan Moore is
like the dead opposite of that. His actual writing
writing – the bits with character and dialogue and description – is plain
great. It’s a pleasure to read. That his plots are usually entertaining too
isn’t entirely relevant. Certainly with his Future Shocks, the plots are not
always original, but it doesn’t matter as it’s fun in most every panel. And, as
mentioned before, he really puts the effort in to make sure the plots make
sense, keeping his stories self-consistent (a complaint he seems to deplore in
other writers).

The final twist in this story is not so surprising (I mean, come on, it's form a Ro-Jaws Robo-Tale!)But the details along the way there are a delight.Art by John Richardson

Portrait of misanthropyArt by Mike White

So much information revealed in one simple panel. That's cartooning, folks.Art by John Higgins

Juxtaposing robot entrails with human sorrowArt by Jesus Redondo

It was all fun and games until it wasn't...Art by Ron Tiner

One of Moore’s first published
stories in the Prog introduced a recurring comedy character, Abelaard Snazz.
These strips are a curious mix of clever that isn’t always clever, and funny
that isn’t always funny. Even the great Moore
had to find his feet at the beginning. But the essential charm was there from
the get-go.

Abelaard Snazz builds robot cops...

...to tackle robot robbers.Art by Steve Dillon

And so onto Moore’s first ongoing
series. It would have been insane, after all that, for Tharg not to pester the
man for a full series. First to run was Skizz,
famously commissioned to match Spielberg’s E.T.,
a film that was storming UK
cinemas when the strip ran, but not at the time Moore (and artist Jim Baikie) where creating
the early episodes. Presumably, all that Tharg/Moore knew about the story was
that it involved a nice alien arriving on Earth, befriending a child, and being
on the run from the authorities.

If you can read Skizz with a Brummie accent in your head, it's even better.Art by Jim Baikie

For whatever reason, Moore chose not to copy much of E.T. at all, and instead borrowed far
more influences from the hit UK TV show Boys
from the Blackstuff. I’ve never seen that, but I gather it’s the
inspiration for Loz, Cornelius and the general angry working
hero/ “I’ve got my pride!” stuff. And this is fun. But for me, the real charm
of Skizz is the attention to the
details of Skizz as an alien, and the character moments in his relationship
with Roxy.

As mentioned above,
it’s not the plot (although that’s great too), it’s the little things.
Especially impressive by today’s standards is the effort Moore puts in to making each episode of the
series be its own thing, while still absolutely pushing forward a continuous
narrative. Again, it’s not like he’s being subtle with some of his themes, but
it’s always entertaining to read, while occasionally smacking of being a bit
clever.

Oh yes, and Skizz is a real tear-jerker, too. I dare
say 2000AD had had its teary moments before (most famously, Ro-Busters: the Terra Meks), but Skizz didn’t hide it behind giant robots
hitting each other.

Speilberg never showed us this sequence in E.T...Art by Jim Baikie

See also Moore’s forays into the
same Ro-Busters, and later ABC Warriors, in some fondly-remembered
Annual/Special stories. I think part of why they’re remembered is the rare
serious / tear-jerking tone. I do wonder if Moore noticed that readers really responded
to this and took it with him in future writings.

Emotions, man!Art by Steve Dillon

And there's some of that clever wordplay we like so much.Art by Steve Dillon & John Higgins

One anomaly was his Rogue Trooper story. Anomaly because I
don’t know that it’s terribly fondly remembered. He brings out a trick he’d
later become famous for on Swamp Thing
– taking a well-known character and revealing new details about their origin to
startle and surprise the readers. So, when Rogue stumbles across ‘the first
GI’, a forgotten and somewhat disfigured survivor of experiments, he and we
feel sad and angry, in an entirely different way from the usual Quartz Zone
trauma. For whatever reason, later writers never picked up on this tidbit,
sparing us the endless antics of, say, Green
Lantern.

Rogue has a shocking encounterArt by Jesus Redondo

Back in the Prog, Moore was casually
shoving pathos over a cliffside as he delivered episode after episode of D.R. & Quinch, a comedy delight of a
series. Unapologetically violent, it’s Moore
firing again on all cylinders: character, dialogue, setting and plot all acting
as one. With Alan Davis’s art to really ram home the craziness, and doing a lot
with the characters to sell sarcasm and insincerity at various key moments.

Mangling song lyrics for our pleasure.Art by Alan Davis

For all that Moore
himself doesn’t seem overly fond of the strip, and the vague (but I think
irrelevant) controversy over lack of originality (see footnote below), I will
never not love this series. If there’s one bad thing about it, it’s that its
shadow looms long and large over the Prog. Sure, there have been other comedy
series, and will be again, but any such series that dares to involve students
is simply going to fall short. Which is a shame, because 2000AD needs a student
comedy. Bec and Kawl had its moments,
and Survival Geeks is fabulous, but
they’re not bloody D.R. & Quinch,
y’know?

So much satuire in so few panels. Could this be the single funniest story in the comic's history?Art by Alan Davis

And so to Moore’s final parting
masterpiece, the Ballad of Halo Jones.
It may or may not be your favourite strip for 2000AD, but it’s the one that’s
most discussed, the one that gets the literati interested, the one that
(apparently) brought a bunch of new readers to the Prog in the mid 80s. And
also yes, it’s effing marvellous.

The Ballad of Halo Jones: smashing through the Bechdel TestArt by Ian Gibson

Even Book 1, which could count as one of the
‘early, funny ones’, to borrow a phrase reserved for beloved auteurs. It’s an
extended adventure over, under and through a shopping mall, amongst other
things. With muggers and other delights.

Sputstick funniesArt by Ian Gibson

But really, the thing
about Halo Jones is that it’s very grown up. It’s not necessarily ‘better’ than
Moore’s other 2000AD work, but it
doesn’t have anything that one might call childish about it (except maybe the
mad robot dog subplot in Book II,
famously editorially mandated to make the strip more child-reader-friendly.
Probably rightly, as that goes). It’s nuanced, character-led storytelling about
an everyman who happens to be a woman, a BIG deal at the time, and arguably
still is now as society and pop culture both remain inherently sexist.

Representing men in girl's war comicsArt by Ian Gibson

There's black humour, then there's making jokes about treatment of PoWs. Clever, funny and now poignant as well.Art by Ian Gibson

Everyone knows that Book III (the first I read, when I was
far too young to understand an awful lot of it) is the best. It’s got the
bumming around the galaxy stuff, the war stuff, the grown-up romance, and the
first bits about the idea that Halo Jones is destined for great things.

Now that's what I call an emotional wallop.Art by Ian Gibson

Obviously it’s a shame that we have yet to see the much-mourned Books IV-IX (an especial shame as Moore had apparently
written up proper outlines for them all!), but I must say that I don’t think
I’d have liked seeing Halo becoming more and more of a big deal in her
Universe. I like her low-key – although
I’m sure Moore
and Gibson had something clever in mind for her character arc. Anyway, we all look forward to reading that one day...

But of course we
won’t.Alan Moore has his reasons for not wanting to produce work for 2000AD again, strethcing back to the owners of the time when he last worked there (and maybe other reasons too). As I understand it (basically I'm guessing!), it'd be to do with the fact that he and Ian Gibson retain no copyright over the characters he created for IPC/Fleetway/Egmont/Rebellion. He's not the only one to be cross about this - perfectly reasonably - although he is perhaps the only one who is determined to stick to some strict definition of principles about the whole thing, while other creators have been pacified by some or other means (inlcuding, but not limited to, needing money). See also: Moore's feuds with Marvel, DC and I'm sure other publishers too.

Goodbye, Alan Moore,
we hardly knew ye. (although of course we went on to find out plenty more with
the non-2000AD comics he write and continues to write. Most of them incredibly
well.)

Shorts: English/Phlondutrian Phrasebook; Last rumble of the Platinum Horde; the
Wages of Sin; Mr, could you use a Sqounge?; And all of them were empty (the
title alone sends chills!); Sunburn; Hyper Historic Headbang; The Reversible
Man; Lethal Laziness of Lobelia Loam; Chronocops; Going native

…and those are just
the ones I can call to mind based on the title; I bet most of the others are
pretty great.

There's a punchline coming...Art by Jesus Redondo

*OK, not ALL the best
ones, but if anyone were to rank them all, pretty much all of his would be
right up there, wouldn’t they?

**As many readers will
know, Moore was very specifically inspired by a US series known
as ‘O.C. and Stiggs’ that ran as short prose stories in National Lampoon
magazine. The style and tone is very similar, to be sure, as Moore himself has
been quick to a) be upfront about and b) lament. Frankly I don’t find this to
be a problem. Also, I’d NEVER have heard of OC & Stiggs if it hadn’t been
for the immense joy and enduring popularity of DR & Quinch. The point is, I
have no qualms giving Moore (and especially Alan Davis) credit for creating
these characters!